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Start-Up Urbanism: 2017, Vol Article Environment and Planning A Start-up urbanism: 2017, Vol. 49(5) 999–1018 ! The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: New York, Rio de Janeiro sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0308518X17690153 and the global urbanization of journals.sagepub.com/home/epn technology-based economies Ugo Rossi Universita` degli Studi di Torino, Italy Arturo Di Bella Universita` degli Studi di Catania, Italy Abstract This article investigates the variegated urbanization of technology-based economies through the lenses of a comparative analysis looking at New York City and Rio de Janeiro. Over the last decade, the former has gained a reputation as a ‘model tech city’ at the global level, while the latter is an example of emerging ‘start-up city’. Using a Marxist-Foucauldian approach, the article argues that, while technopoles in the 1980s and the 1990s arose from the late Keynesian state, the globally hegemonic phenomenon of start-up urbanism is illustrative of an increasingly decentralized neoliberal project of self-governing ‘enterprise society’, mobilizing ideas of community, cooperation and horizontality within a context of cognitive-communicative capitalism in which urban environments acquire renewed centrality. In doing so, the article underlines start-up urbanism’s key contribution to the reinvention of the culture of global capitalism in times of perceived economic shrinkage worldwide and the central role played by major metropolitan centres in this respect. Keywords Global urbanization, neoliberal governmentality, New York, Rio de Janeiro, technology start-ups Introduction In a context of advanced, increasingly multicentric globalization, cities are key to the cyclical evolution of capitalist economies, understood as inherently unstable economic systems (Sheppard, 2011): cities are often behind economic downturns and recessions, due to the volatility of their overheated real estate markets but also as spaces condensing the wider contradictions of capitalism; at the same time, they are crucial to processes of economic recovery and renaissance in which the logic of capital accumulation is constantly reinvented Corresponding author: Ugo Rossi, Department of Economics and Social Sciences, Corso Unione Sovietica 218bis, Universita` degli Studi di Torino, Torino 10134, Italy. Email: [email protected] 1000 Environment and Planning A 49(5) (Rossi, 2017). The last 10 years have particularly illuminated this duplicity. In the aftermath of the global economic crisis, characterized by a new wave of austerity urbanism (Peck, 2012) and generalized fears about a ‘secular stagnation’ (Summers, 2014), at the public policy level there has been an explosion of interest in the growth potential of contemporary cities, especially in relation to the advent of socially interactive digital technologies. In the post- recession years, cities and particularly their central areas in the United States and other capitalist economies have indeed emerged as incubator spaces for the phenomenon of technological start-up companies that has rapidly spread across the globalized world. In a recent report documenting the rise of the so-called ‘start-up cities’ in the United States, Richard Florida has emphasized how high-tech start-up businesses are spatially concentrated within inner-city districts, rather than in suburban areas, thus challenging the Silicon Valley model or, at least, offering an alternative to its spatial and socio- economic pattern (Florida, 2014). In a subsequent report, this author has expanded his view on the phenomenon, arguing that venture capital increasingly flows into top global cities in both the North and the South of the world (Florida, 2016). Richard Florida and other mainstream urban and regional economists contend that technology-oriented cities and metropolitan areas have become engines of capitalist recovery and innovation in the United States as well as in the emerging economies of the globalized world (Florida, 2012; Glaeser, 2011; Moretti, 2012). The worldwide eruption of the start-up phenomenon sheds light on a renewed ‘urban centrality’ within contemporary technology-driven capitalism. Cities are no longer acting only as nodes of stretched value chains specializing in advanced producer services, as the first generation of global city scholarship particularly evidenced, but also as privileged sites for technology-intensive interactive economies. Complex ecosystems involving a wide array of actors, institutions and relational networks have taken shape at the urban level in this context. The news media have enthusiastically embraced technology-based start-up urbanism as a new promised land of socio-economic prosperity. Start-up urbanism is customarily represented as a new ‘happiness industry’, an emotional machine reviving capitalism’s promise of happiness in a general context of economic shrinkage (Ahmed, 2010; Davies, 2015; Florida et al., 2013). For instance, The Economist has dedicated a special report to the start-up phenomenon emphatically entitled ‘A Cambrian moment’, whose introduction stresses the intimately urban dimension of high-tech start-up companies: Start-ups are a big part of a new movement back to the city. Young people increasingly turn away from suburbia and move to hip urban districts, which become breeding grounds for new firms. Even Silicon Valley’s centre of gravity is no longer along Highway 101 but in San Francisco south of Market Street. (The Economist, 2014: 2) Think tanks and foundations, drawing on knowledge and expertise provided by urban development gurus (academics like Richard Florida plus a plethora of ‘global consultants’), the vast majority based in North America, have played a central role in this process of discourse production and dissemination, exerting strong influence over the public policy sphere. The resulting process of policy mobility (McCann and Ward, 2011; Peck and Theodore, 2015) has globalized the pursuit of start-up urbanism. High-tech entrepreneurial communities from all across the world portray their urban environments as ‘start-up cities’, using closely related jargon and discourse. At the same time, digital technologies have enabled the circulation of this emerging culture of tech-driven capitalism beyond the role of established intermediaries acting as ‘agents of persuasion’ (Peck, 2002). The advent of a global start-up city has therefore become a largely decentralized discourse, despite its roots being originally associated with the US economy and society. Rossi and Di Bella 1001 This article looks at two examples of start-up urbanism: New York City and Rio de Janeiro. The former has acquired a reputation as a ‘model tech city’ at the global level; the latter offers an example of emerging ‘start-up city’, where the entrepreneurial state plays a decisive role in creating a self-propulsive start-up economy. The article compares these emerging trajectories of start-up urbanism to previous policy experiments aimed at creating technopoles in different geographical contexts in the 1980s and the 1990s. In doing so, it argues that, while technolopoles revealed a logic of policy-driven regional economic development emanating from the entrepreneurialist ‘late Keynesian state’, start-up urbanism is associated with a neoliberal governmental rationality aiming at creating conditions for a self-governing ‘enterprise society’ (Lazzarato, 2009) whose ultimate goal is the pursuit of the ‘entrepreneur of the self’ (Gordon, 1991). Being an urban tech entrepreneur entails adopting an ‘integral form-of-life’, based on a combination of emotions, habits and modes of relationality, rather than simply embarking on an entrepreneurial project. According to Michel Foucault, the ‘entrepreneur of the self’ is a pillar of the biopolitical project of societal government in advanced liberal societies: The stake in all neoliberal analyses is the replacement every time of homo oeconomicus as partner of exchange with a homo oeconomicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings. (Foucault, 2008: 229) In the current politico-economic context, the city is seen as an ‘ecosystem’, comprising knowledge, creativity and a variety of communities of practice, enabling the individual to become an ‘entrepreneur of himself’. This ecosystem provides what we defined here as the ‘cognitive-communicative capital’ of cities. Urban politico-economic elites mobilize for the valorization of this capital, as the two trajectories of start-up urbanism being investigated here demonstrate in different ways, as we will see. The article is structured as follows: in the first section, we introduce readers to the notion of cognitive-communicative capital, drawing mainly on the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who have highlighted the affirmative dimension of biopolitical capitalism, and on that of Jodi Dean, who has analysed the communicative politics of late liberal societies after the advent of the Internet 2.0. In the second section, the article articulates the notion of ‘global start-up urbanism’, showing how this notion challenges previous understandings of technopoles and informational cities. The third section presents our comparative research on New York and Rio de Janeiro. The article concludes with a discussion of the case studies and a more general reflection on the contribution this research has to offer to contemporary debates over global urbanization and urbanism. The cognitive-communicative capital of cities
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